A discussion started recently on the Jabber social mailing-list about the current state of XMPP support at Facebook. If you don’t remember the idea of a XMPP network for Facebook I’d say it’s rather normal considering they talked about it back in May 2008 and nothing has really happened since then. The discussion has quickly drifted toward the difficulty XMPP knows to really make it big and you can sense some despair within the community.

It seems there are several reasons for this.

First and foremost, XMPP is rather poorly integrated within browsers. Today you have to be part of the browser if you want to succeed. Perhaps the response will come from the rather brilliant lib Strophe. Strophe uses BOSH to connect to XMPP services since Javascript doesn’t offer much access to the low level socket connection object. I hope in the future browsers will offer a built-in XMPP API that can be accessed from Javascript allowing to avoid using BOSH.

Second of all, we need big players to start accepting to let go and start entering Jabber federations so that interoperability actually works. I assume companies have yet to find a way on how they can exercise control over the data they might expose through XMPP whilst finding a way to monetize them.

Third I’d say there is a critical lack of PR around XMPP as an added value to the business. To be honest there is the same issue with AtomPub in my opinion. Both are fantastic technologies but they don’t sell by themselves and I find there is a lack of support from companies to support them. SOAP might have been a crap technology but it was backed up by large businesses that were competing with each other (for the worse one might argue).

Finally, and to me this is the most critical reason, XMPP doesn’t integrate well with the web in general. From the browser side as I suggested above to the fact that it’s rather hard to combine web application with jabber ones. Its definitely doable but requires some careful attention to your architecture. Jack Moffitt argues it’s not XMPP’s fault. It’s quite true as a protocol but I believe it’s not really the right way to invite web developers to push it one step further if you blame them for doing it wrong.

I believe XMPP has tremendous potential but it’s still has some way to go before it finds its place.